All Night Long, Questions Edition, part II: Official

Dear Diary,

I was going to wait until Saturday to tell you what's in this part, and then another week for part III, but after tonight's hike, I don't see the point.

As you know, dear Diary, I'm not doing "Building a Baseline" the way I wanted to, because that way wouldn't have gotten me to all the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation water fountains before they started getting turned off.  And that, in turn, was because Parks didn't get me a trustworthy list of water fountains when I asked for one.  So instead I'm making a mad dash to visit all of Parks's locations looking for water fountains.

And the obvious place to start, dear Diary, the richest trove of close-together Parks locations, is where we in fact started way back when, in the U-District.  Well, I decided to combine it with Ravenna, and trying to follow all the trails in Ravenna and Cowen parks soaked up much of a day.  But on Friday, September 11, I finally arrived at University Playground at 8:47 am and found the restrooms not open yet.

Only wait a minute.  Didn't I see in the popular tool Parks runs, "Find a Restroom in a Park", that University Playground's restrooms are not only open, but open 24 hours?  Yep, there it is:

Now, how could it be that someone went to University Playground on September 10 specifically to close its restrooms so they'd be respectfully closed on the anniversary?

Still, I thought it better to wait to say anything.  So I wrote part I of this page even after getting photos at 2:30 pm on the 12th:

and without mentioning it.  And then on the 13th, imagine, dear Diary, my surprise when I showed up at 3:30 pm and found this:

So, tonight.  I'd been more careful than on September 5th, but the house I live in has a "quiet time", and I had a sandwich at home I wanted to eat, so I wanted to wash my hands.

I didn't get going until pretty late, indeed not, as I'd thought, within "park hours" (6 am to 10 pm), but I was so optimistic.  Only to find that women's room not only locked but chained and padlocked as if to shout as loudly as possible, "Yes, you want it, but we won't let you have it".  And I didn't even actually want it - with my luck, the woman of my dreams would show up while I was washing my hands and shriek in horror.

So on I went to the nearest, at that point, of the city's other official 24-hour restrooms, at Gas Works Park.  Where I wandered for some time before accepting that the old restroom building was gone.  It's been replaced by three single-user stalls, which is definitely fewer than the old building had, 

and are you surprised, dear Diary, to hear they were all locked?

At this point, I can't even pretend to care whether the remaining one, the Portland Loo at Ballard Commons, has an external lock or not.  Obviously the list of restrooms open "park hours" in the "Find a Restroom in a Park" tool is simply another batch of lies from the Parks department.

Your readers, dear Diary, may be able to play along at home!  So here are the ones not in North Seattle:

• Alki Beach 57th Ave SW
• Alki  Beach 63rd Ave SW
• Alki Beach Bathhouse
• Armeni Boat Ramp
• Discovery Park South Bluff
• Queen Anne Bowl
• Seacrest Park
• South Park Community Center

Are any of those really open 24 hours?  Let us know!

Two details to finish up with before part III.  All the restrooms I'm talking about are, according to the now tainted tool, open "park hours", not "24 hours".  Why is that?  Well, Parks wouldn't want to encourage any lawbreaking in pursuit of anything so trivial as the cessation of pain, now would they?

But it only takes a moment's thought to see this as a charade.  First of all, Parks only has a few schedules for their parks.  To take North Seattle alone, Green Lake Park and Ballard Commons close at 11:30 pm, Gas Works Park and University Playground at 10 pm.  Are they really keeping two staffers busy at such hours locking restrooms in North Seattle?

Second, nobody but homeless people with smartphones is going to care about restrooms open "park hours".  The point of the charade is to associate the reliable 24-hour restrooms at Green Lake with all these lies, to make the lies easier to swallow.  Why they'd want to make lies easier to swallow, though, I have no idea.  Is the person in charge of the tool a sadist?

And Green Lake is the other detail.  On September 5th I visited that park's North restrooms (in the tool, and in Parks parlance, "wading pool").  And tonight I finally washed my hands at the 64th St restrooms ("65th St").  For some reason they don't lie about the real 24-hour restrooms at Green Lake.

This is a depressing page, dear Diary, and I'm afraid the only way I can offer hope in the next part, coming up soon, is based on the premise of Seattle doing things right.  Well, Parks wouldn't have gotten away with what they're doing if Seattle were in the habit of doing things right.

Seattle Parks Is Trying to Tell the Truth. Will I Survive the Shock?

Dear Diary,

I have a notion that being an inveterate liar is kind of like other moral failings, and so although lying has never been an important sin to me, I can figure out what it's like by analogy.  I think there are two ways to try to stop sinning in general, and so lying in particular.  One is the folk wisdom that a sinner has to "hit bottom", get to where confessing and giving up the sin is the only way forward.  But the other is to work on one's personality and one's reality until giving up the sin won't hurt so much.  In this particular case, until lying is no longer needed.  That path, which is if anything harder than hitting bottom and making other people responsible for dealing with it, is the path it seems to me the City of Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation has chosen.

I pointed out a number of ludicrous details in the department's new "dashboard" (a word I kind of wish had died of COVID-19 toward the end of the pandemic, but still, that's what it's called).  It said Cowen Park's restrooms, which had been damaged by early opening in March 2022 and hadn't re-opened since, were open.  It said Ravenna Park's lower pair of restrooms, which have been perennial targets of vandals, and where the men's room hadn't opened at all in 2022, were both open.  And to top this series of obvious whoppers off, it said University Playground's restrooms, which hadn't been opened by parks department employees at any time since before the pandemic started, were both open.

I recently learnt that I wasn't quite as poor as I thought I was, because my bank hadn't charged a fee I'd expected them to charge.  So today I splurged on a newspaper and went hiking, prepared to mock yet another parks department lying map afterward.

I found both of Cowen Park's restrooms open today.

I found all four of Ravenna Park's restrooms open today.

I didn't find either of University Playground's restrooms open today, but a small group of homeless people there told me that was because they'd been locked half an hour earlier.  Considering that it was 5:41 P.M. when I was told this, that's testimony to way too early closing, but still, sadly, believable.  Supporting this preposterous turn of events actually having happened, the restroom doors both had new handles (dear Diary, your readers can, if they wish, compare the handle shown here to those in previous photos via the tags at the bottom of the page, or directly here if reading on cell phones, which didn't offer those tags the last time I looked.)

Notice, dear Diary, that these handles are set into circular supports; the previous handles, which were blocky rather than delicate themselves, weren't set into anything like that.  I think the evidence is good that University Playground's restrooms have finally re-opened.

So the parks department has done the hard work to justify its claims regarding all the restrooms I visited today.  Including those at Burke-Gilman Playground Park.  Now, this is where Google Maps lied to me today; it claims the whole park is temporarily closed.  

 

But actually, well, let's see if I can do this:

(I was trying to just paste a print-screen from OpenStreetMap into the page.  No, I couldn't.  Darn.)  Only part of the park is closed, the northeastern part.  The parks department also tells the truth about this:

And someone carefully removed the sign adjacent to the Burke-Gilman Trail there pointing the way to the restrooms.

 

Yes, dear Diary, they're building new restrooms there.  I hope this time they're winter-proof, but I sure hope, if I become homeless again before winter and there's another pandemic, they finish quickly.

I remembered from long ago that the neatest thing I thought Burke-Gilman Playground Park had to offer was a play fortress thingy sort of at the northwestern corner of the northeastern part of the park.  So I looked in its direction from the street, but couldn't tell whether it'd been protected or not.  (I'm more pessimistic that the actually neater sundial, also mentioned in that page, could've stayed in situ and been safe, so I hope it was moved.)  The building all that landscape destruction is in aid of is still standing, but perhaps so far all they've had time to do is pull the plumbing out.  (In the photo I uploaded to Google Drive, at full size a viewer can see the holes where the water fountain was attached.)

Anyway, my point is, that this morning when I checked the dashboard again hoping they'd have stopped, as I thought, lying and I could do other stuff today, they showed a bunch of restrooms as closed due to "Capital Project"s, and this was one of them.

Their water fountain map is still way too optimistic, I suspect; it's now up to 5 off, 206 on.  I found three off today, but one isn't theirs; it's the one where University Methodist Temple used to be, the stone edifice of the water fountain (not the church) still standing, but with no plumbing left inside.  I've reported the "lower" Ravenna Park fountain using "Find It - Fix It", which is how they say they want updates to those maps.  I haven't reported yet the weird stone water fountain pretty far southwest in Laurelhurst Playfield.  I guess I'll see what happens to the water fountain map tomorrow, when I plan to hide from the rain, having already lost my umbrella this year.

The Seattle Times, whose weather forecaster likes to go to extremes, is currently predicting lows for the weekend of 33º Friday night, 32º Saturday night, and 34º Sunday night.  Usually the parks department has been able to shrug off October freezes, but if the Times's extremism comes true (as it does depressingly often), that may be a too long-lasting example for the same reaction.   No official word yet, but my point, dear Diary, is that as usual, I've left it too late to get every park visited before it all changes.  The questions is whether it matters.  Is the parks department really turning over a new leaf?  Will it, for example, admit what's happening when it closes the majority of its restrooms for the winter?  Or is this just another episode in a longer battle?

One reason I've been paying so much attention to libraries lately, dear Diary, is to have another string to your bow as well as my own.  I think the last thing I expected was to have the parks department remove your raison d'être, but if it happens, it happens.  I will admit, I found myself getting both reminiscent and bored today as I took all these photos; I really didn't want, in particular, to get the only newspaper I can probably afford soon wet by photographing water fountains.  (And Jenny Durkan is no longer in office, so need I really worry about another Durkan Drought?  Well, only if there's another pandemic...)

Anyway, photos other than the above (most of those above are actually not at these links):

Cowen Park

Ravenna Park

Burke-Gilman Trail, 30th Ave fountain

Burke-Gilman Playground Park (including none of the photos above, only the photo that sort of shows where the water fountain was)

Laurelhurst Community Center (restrooms) and Playfield (water fountains)

Burke-Gilman Trail, 47th St fountain

Former University Methodist Church, former street fountain

Christie Park

University Playground (including the photo above)

Time marches on, dear Diary; there's a reason I ditched "months" in the titles of the library pages.  I'm working on three fronts:

For part VI of public library hours, I've finished work on Wahkiakum County and started on revising the actual page and on San Juan County.  Cowlitz County, however, is nearly three times as big a job as those two put together, and Skagit County nearly four times.  So we'll see.

For part II of institutional libraries, I now have my list and just need to get through it; as I said in part I, it's a long list.

And I'm also dipping my toes into part I of academic libraries.

Whatever, though, you should hear from me again reasonably soon, dear Diary.  Happy nights and days until then.

Truth and fantasy about park restrooms in winter

Dear Diary,

I've now mapped the park restrooms that were promised to be open in North Seattle last winter:

and then modified that map by what I found in February and in March:

The big circles that are obvious on the map represent differences between what I found and what we were all told last November.  Eight of those differences are restrooms closed that the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation's spokes-person claimed would be open; and two are restrooms open that she did not claim would be.

1. Little Brook Park.  We were told the unheated wooden box of a restroom this park has would be open this past winter, and to emphasise the point, responsibility for keeping it open was given to both the Northwest and the Northeast parks maintenance crews.  However, someone on one of those crews sensibly enough put a closure sign up instead.  Lake City still needs real park restrooms, which should be in Virgil Flaim Park; it doesn't need jokes about the inadequate room it has instead.
   
2. Jackson Park.  The parks department tends to ignore this park in many ways, including lists of restrooms; in particular, the restrooms there are maintained, opened and closed by employees of a private lessee, not by the parks department.  So this is more an apparent difference than a real one, but still, there's restrooms in a city-owned park that were open this past winter but not in the posted list, so it's still a difference.
3. Sandel Playground.  Both in 2020-2021 and in 2022-2023 I found the restrooms there locked; in both years they were supposed to open.  I think this is a disagreement between the parks department's PR people and the northwest maintenance crew.  I hope they settle it before next winter.
4. Green Lake Park, Bathhouse restrooms.  These are customarily open in winter and summer, but not in spring and fall, so again, I wasn't surprised to find them open despite their omission from the posted list, but it's still a difference.
   
5. Salmon Bay Park.  I'm not sure whether this building has heat, but it doesn't have much room for it, and these restrooms haven't customarily been open in winter.  I'm guessing this lie was meant to appease people in Ballard who want the homeless to have somewhere to go besides the library and the bushes.  Maybe including Ballard's city council member?  Or maybe it was much less than that, just a joke on me, as previously suggested.  Mind, dear Diary, I still don't have a clue why the indoor restrooms with doors that open to the outdoors, in the Ballard Community Center, close each winter, unless it's out of hatred towards homeless people.  But we weren't promised Ballard Community Center last winter, and we were promised Salmon Bay Park.
   
6. Green Lake Park, Shellhouse restrooms.  These are customarily open year-round, but the building they're in is currently behind a construction fence.
7. Ravenna Park, lower restrooms.  These are customarily open year-round, but the men's room has been locked for years, and the women's room was locked too when I went there this past winter.
8. Woodland Park, Citywide Athletics Building ("Rio") restrooms.  These have also been locked for years, and have acquired an impressive amount of graffiti on this subject.  Now, closing restrooms in winter that could be kept open is supposed to enable the parks maintenance crews to clean graffiti up, so I'm not sure why they're neglecting these examples.  Nor am I clear on why the athletes were left without restrooms this past winter, considering that a perfectly reasonable alternative (Woodland Park Cloverleaf) is available a few blocks north, and was opened winter 2020-2021.
9. University Playground.  The restrooms have been closed for years, since the pandemic began and probably since before then.  They've been fenced in, in the recent past; they're now welded shut.  A blatant lie.
10. Gas Works Park.  A little further along than the Green Lake Small Crafts Center (whose restrooms are referred to by the name of the nearby Shellhouse); here it's the place where the building was that's now surrounded by a construction fence.

In the past, I've suggested that the parks department's pathological inability to tell the truth about its winter restrooms resulted from a sorcerer's spell.  This year, there's perhaps a more prosaic explanation.  This past winter, visitors to parks all over southern North Seattle, south of 65th, say, got to experience what park visitors in Lake City experience all the time:  no restrooms.  As many were closed despite claims they'd be open, as were open:  Green Lake Shellhouse, Woodland "Rio", Gas Works, lower Ravenna, and University were all promised but closed; Woodland Pink Palace and 50th, Green Lake 64th, Wallingford and - I presume, not having gotten there myself - Laurelhurst were all promised and open.  Now, something similar happens in West Seattle on a regular basis, and West Seattle typically has more political power in Seattle than southern North Seattle does.  But maybe the parks department didn't like the optics of admitting how far someone needing a restroom would have to walk, in southern North Seattle, so it decorated truth with fantasy.

Or maybe it didn't like admitting how few open restroom locations in North Seattle it was using our tax dollars to support this winter, so it added a few it knew wouldn't be open.  We were promised 25.  We got 18.  (Jackson Park's restrooms aren't supported by tax dollars.)  In 2019-2020, we got 23.  We got 72% of what was promised, and 78% of three years ago.  In my experience, in school, these would usually be passing grades, but they aren't in my current job.  Are they passing grades in parks department jobs?

At least this year, there isn't an agency serving the homeless that relies on the parks department to tell the truth about its own property.  So with any luck, my former peers weren't misled by those lies.  I wonder who else was.

Good night, dear Diary.  I don't know when I'll be back, so have a happy spring, by day and night both.

Happy Birthday, Dear Diary! Seattle Parks Lied Again!

Dear Diary,

I'm sorry for neglecting you for so long, and especially given that I left you on a cliffhanger, not knowing whether I'd become homeless over a month ago or had gotten a job at long last.

Well, it was the latter.  I've spent years of my life preparing people's taxes, and got a job by being willing to keep a tax office open the entirety of its open hours.  Which left me only one day off per week.

So I spent those days off hiking, but didn't even get around to uploading the photos to Google Drive timely, much less telling you, Dear Diary, about the hikes, with all the maps and other paraphernalia we've gotten used to.

Now that tax season is over, mirabile dictu, I still have a job, but with considerably fewer hours.  And I wanted to congratulate you on your third birthday, Dear Diary, with a preview of those hikes' results.

I'd told you before about the announcement by Christina Hirsch in November 2022 of which park restrooms would be open this winter.  It's her second such announcement, the first having appeared in 2019.  The 2019 list turned out to be a much better guide to which park restrooms in North Seattle were open during the winter of 2020-2021 than the map the city was then promoting as answering that question.  But by now, things have changed.  The 2022 list omits a few restrooms the 2019 list included:  Ballard Commons (which was fenced closed until March 12 of this year); Cal Anderson Park (sort of:  it's listed this time as having had "portables", but the 2019 list had no such note); Discovery Park's beach restrooms; Green Lake Park's Bathhouse restrooms (which I nevertheless found open).

And it adds a ton of others, eighteen, near as I can count.  Only four of these are in North Seattle, and in my own November 2022 discussion I expressed surprise about three of these.  I didn't find any of the four actually open.

On Sunday, February 19th, at 3:08 P.M., Little Brook Park's restroom (yes, only one) was closed with a seasonal closure sign posted:

At 4:17 P.M. that day, I found University Playground's restrooms not only closed, but welded closed:

On Sunday, February 26th at 6:33 P.M., I found Salmon Bay Park's restrooms closed.  I didn't think they looked like they'd been used recently, but the thing is, park restroom hours are 7 A.M. to 7 P.M. most times of the year, and I was trying, in these hikes, to be extremely fair to Seattle's Department of Parks and Recreation, by limiting my hikes to 8 A.M. to 6 P.M.  So I went back to Salmon Bay Park on Sunday, March 12th at 5:47 P.M.

Meanwhile, on Sunday, March 5th, I'd reached Sandel Playground at 6:06 P.M., technically outside my limits, but I mean, really.  Of the many lies I caught the parks department in during the winter of 2020-2021, the only one that took Ms. Hirsch's colleague Rachel Schulkin by surprise was that Sandel Playground's restrooms were closed.  They hadn't been in the 2019 list, but in 2020-2021 they were supposed to have been open, and weren't.  The same happened in 2022-2023:

I wasn't able to get back to Sandel Playground before 6 P.M. until Wednesday, March 22nd, and having already found Greenwood Park's restroom, a twin to Little Brook Park's, open that day, was unsurprised to find Sandel Playground's restrooms open too.

Basically, I think none of the four additions in North Seattle was real, and three were outright lies.  The question I had, though, was whether that was Ms. Hirsch's little joke on you, dear Diary, and me, or whether the parks department was really inflating its winter restroom numbers city-wide.  I thought if those four were the only additions, that would be a give-away, but actually there were fourteen other additions, none of which I got a chance to visit.  Dear Diary, you've been visited a lot ever since I signed up at an active job-hunting site, but I'm not sure how many of those visits have been by actual human beings.  But if anyone who reads this can comment on whether restrooms were open this past winter in the following parks, I'd be very grateful:

1. Alki Beach - Was listed only once in 2019, but with three locations in 2022.  So two of 63rd, 57th and Bath House should've been open besides the one that was open then.
2. Alki Beach - The other new one.
3. Beer Sheva Park.
4. Dr. Blanche Lavizzo Park.
5. Hiawatha.
6. Magnolia Community Center.  The 2019 list included only Community Centers which had restrooms with doors that open to the outside, which are more obviously park restrooms than other Community Center restrooms.  I don't know that all the Community Centers in the 2022 list have such outside-opening restrooms, though.
7. Montlake Community Center.
8. Mount Baker Park.
9. Pratt Park.  This park's restrooms were definitely under construction when I first visited the place in winter 2021-2022.  It's at least plausible that the old ones didn't have heat while the new ones do.  (It's thoroughly implausible that Cal Anderson Park's restrooms went from having heat to not having it.)
   
10. Queen Anne Bowl.
11. Riverview Playfield.
12. Seward Park Picnic Shelters.
13. South Park Community Center.
14. Volunteer Park Bandstand.

Anyway, parks in North Seattle whose restrooms' openness I didn't check in winter 2022-2023:  I didn't visit Meadowbrook Playfield or Laurelhurst Community Center at all; I didn't visit Ross Park, Maple Leaf Reservoir Park (which Hirsch's lists call Maple Leaf Playground), Dahl Playfield, Licton Springs Park, Greenwood Park, or Sandel Playground, within the hours I'd limited myself to, before the spring openings.  Of these, Laurelhurst, Maple Leaf, Dahl and Sandel were supposed to be open, and I'm guessing the first three of those actually were open, though Maple Leaf is often closed on Sundays both in winter and at other times of year.  Ross, Meadowbrook, Licton Springs and Greenwood weren't supposed to be open, and of those, only Meadowbrook could reasonably have been opened.  (Licton Springs's restrooms, of course, have been torn down.)

I also in November called attention to Matthews Beach, which is consistently supposed to have open restrooms in winter, but I never found them so in 2020-2021.  I did find them open this time.  They're two single-stall all-gender rooms, one of which had been boarded over in 2020-2021; both were open on February 19th.

This time I only paid attention to water fountains conveniently near restrooms, but also to the street fountains.  I found four park water fountains running.  Three were attached to heated buildings - one of the golf buildings at Jackson Park, the cloverleaf restrooms of Woodland Park and the beach restrooms of Magnuson Park.  The fourth is free-standing, and I'm frankly amazed it was still running on February 19th, at Magnuson Park's central restrooms.  I don't remember what I found re street fountains - I think, one running, one not, but no idea which.

All for now, and pedants would say I've missed your birthday anyhow, but here's to a good year ahead for you, dear Diary!

Four or More Hikes in University Heights

Dear Diary,

Sorry it's a day later than I predicted.  It turns out I can't keep all the geography of I-5 in the U-District in my head at once; I went out twice yesterday and once today to look at it again.  Anyway.  This page concerns hikes on the 8th, 14th, 16th and 18th of this month, and the dozen places I think fit best here.  That's rather a lot, so let's get started.

We're going to need two maps for these places.  Here's the first, which shows most of them:

 

On the 8th, as with the other parts of this region of North Seattle, I wanted mainly to visit places owned, leased or otherwise controlled by the City of Seattle, according to the city's 2020 real property report.  (The main reason I don't use later reports is that they only inconsistently include leased property.)  I'd started with Ravenna, and then taken the Burke-Gilman Trail to the area south of University Heights, Brooklyn.  So this was the last area where I took photos that day, though I then unwisely returned to Ravenna chasing an SPU property that turned out to be a mirage.

University Neighborhood Service Center, take 1 (A on map)

I was a quarter hour too late to go inside this rented space, because I'd been looking for ball point pens at the University Bookstore a block south.

On the way to my next stop, I noticed an informational pillar.  It's good to know the U District Partnership is on the ball, keeping up with things timelier than I do:

University Heights Plaza (B on map)

Dear Diary, two and a half years into this, I think I've got the hang of this.  University Heights Plaza, a park owned by Seattle's Department of Parks and Recreation, is a rectangle that's mostly a basketball court, right?

The King County parcel viewer seems to agree.  As I've previously mentioned to you, dear Diary, the "sanican"s and hand-washing station that had been in the plaza during the lockdowns are now gone, so this park is even less a part of my usual rounds than it had been then.  The street sink the cited page mentions isn't on the plaza, but on University Heights's private land, a little north of the P-patch.  Speaking of which...

University Heights P-Patch (C on map)

I think I'm obviously the wrong person to see what, if anything, is distinctive about particular P-patches.  This one at least doesn't have any stairs.

Fire Station 17 (D on map)

When I visited Fire Station 9 in Fremont last summer, I photographed a bunch of signage showing COVID-related closures of various kinds.  Not so here this time:

So my doubts about continuing to point the fire stations out are returning.  I'll have to think about that and let you know, dear Diary.

University branch Library (E on map)

From the downtown hikes of September, I've concluded that it's silly to keep taking restroom and water fountain photos inside buildings, since defects in these things are rarely tolerated for long, unlike in parks.  Also, people inside buildings seem much readier to take offense than people in parks at the use of a camera near restrooms.  However, the only photo I took here, this time, that wasn't a restroom or water fountain shot was a similarly boring door-signage one:

University Playground

The restrooms here have been closed since before the pandemic.  There's still a "sanican", without hand-washing station, in the park, but it's no longer at the back of the restroom building, instead near the northwest exit from the park.  The water fountain works fine.  Relevant photos from October 8th and several past visits are in the Google Drive folder.

I took a landscape shot, unsure whether I'd be back before the next encampment makes such a photo more difficult to take, given my rules:

It occurs to me, dear Diary, that I mostly don't have a clue who reads you any more, so should explain my rules for photo taking again, since they'll be relevant pretty soon.  I don't deliberately photograph people, originally because I didn't want to negotiate image rights while socially distanced, now mainly because I don't really want to negotiate them at all.  I take pains not to photograph homeless people's tents.  I bend these rules where necessary (e.g., photographing anything near Pike Place Market) as long as the people or tents are significantly distant, and even then strongly prefer that the people's faces aren't visible.

Anyway, the remaining stops from October 8 are on the other map, which we've seen before in the first part about hiking Ravenna:

Two snippets (F on second map)

Real property reports mention lots of "parcel"s and "snippet"s.  In previous cases, I've only intermittently been able to identify these.  My record is now a little bit better; I'm pretty sure these protrusions into 8th Ave NE are the two intended by 799 NE 56th St and 810 NE 55th St, 56th first:

I'd rather the report listed the reasonably attractive street circle at 8th Ave NE and NE 56th St:

but although that's pretty certainly city-owned, it isn't what's meant.

Shiga's Garden (G on second map)

Another P-patch:

As implied, that's it for the hike of October 8th in this area.  On October 14, I went to places suggested by Open Street Map, specifically two of them, plus I went back to the Neighborhood Service Center.  But first...

Notes on the land east of I-5 here

In the northwestern part of this region, there's little land east of I-5, as opposed to reasonably generous amounts west of it, enough for a park (NE 60th St Park) and a volunteer garden/orchard (Freeway Estates).  South of 53rd, that all changes, and down to 42nd or so, all the land worth mentioning is east of I-5.  This is partly, but I think not entirely, because of lots of entrances from and exits to the U-District.

The story of this land that I'm prepared to tell today and most likely tomorrow is a story of fences.  For whatever reason, much of the land is fenced in, or fairly recently was fenced in.  Much of the fenced land is steep, which argues that safety is the main concern, but I doubt that's all or even most of it, because much of the fenced land isn't steep, and there doesn't seem to be much correlation between steepness and fencing.  At least one substantial park housed people could plausibly enjoy would be possible near I-5 in the first area I'll discuss below.

Another element of the story:  Some of this land is currently inhabited.  In general, dear Diary, I haven't identified homeless people's use of the land since the previous mayor ramped up sweeps again sometime in 2021.  As I predicted in "Away from the Manger", the last part of my Christmas triptych last year, homeless people have metastasised throughout the city, no longer allowed to be anywhere in numbers, but still finding enough nooks and crannies in both public and private land to avoid (at least as far as I've seen) having to risk using residential porches.  However, in this case some of the land (south of the area this page covers) has recently been swept of holdover encampments; this suggests that the use of the rest (mostly also by holdover encampments) is known to the sweepers.  And I can't tell the story of the fences without talking about the ways in which they've been circumvented, which obviously suggests the land's homeless residents as the agents of circumvention (though hardly the only possible ones).

East of I-5, area 4 (H on first map)

The circumvention here, going south toward 47th St from 50th St, is simple.  The fence has a gate in it, not far south of 50th, and that gate has been open every time, in the over two weeks I've been hiking for these pages, I've gotten close enough to check.  (Mind, that's only been three or four times, but still.)  Near as I can tell, nothing was destroyed unless there was a padlock or some such on the gate.

There aren't many tents here, and it's easy to avoid them while hiking south much of the way to 47th in this substantial area.  It's mostly overgrown grass:

with occasional outcrops of thicker vegetation:

I can't see why these however-many acres have been abandoned like this.  Maybe because of the same sluggishness, on the part of the State of Washington Department of Transportation, that has exasperated the city's leaders because WSDOT hasn't gone all-out to sweep homeless people from its properties as the city has.  But if WSDOT is finally doing sweeps now, I have to wonder why it can't also do something positive at least with this space.

University Child Development School's playgrounds (I on first map)

Dear Diary, when I started writing you, I wondered what the U-District had done, that most of its playgrounds were locked.  There are at least three examples on the UW campus, there's the University Heights playground (on the first map above, but no photos), and then there are these.  Obviously private land owners, like U-Heights and UCDS, have the right to lock up their playgrounds, but where are the public ones that could make such locked private playgrounds irrelevant?  University Playground, whose restrooms haven't been open for years.  And in other neighbourhoods.  That's where.  What's wrong with the U-District having more and better?

Anyway, typical signage for the private playgrounds, emphasising private property:

University Neighborhood Service Center, take 2 (A on map)

On the afternoon of the 14th I managed to get inside this place.  I didn't get anywhere near the counter, there were so many people in line.  I noticed that the public use computer that had been on a desk in the front of this rented storefront was gone; some people were at that desk filling out forms.

This is meant to be a general place for residents of Seattle to deal with their government, and its signage still sort of reflects that.  But they've adopted a sideline that now more or less wags the dog.

From the things they were holding and the things they were saying, I'm pretty sure that all the people I saw in line, with maybe one or two exceptions, were there to get passports, which isn't even a city function.

Unable to reach the staff, I couldn't ask whether they offered a public restroom, but I'm pretty sure I remember their not having one when I visited while homeless a few times, and because where I stood while assessing the situation was near the storefront's back door, I could see signs warning the public away.

Since the 14th most of my hiking has been about loose ends and University of Washington buildings.  You already saw a few signs of the latter, dear Diary, in the third Ravenna page; the first map above has more; Brooklyn's map has tons, which is why I've left that area for last.  But for this region and Brooklyn, the main loose end has been that my record-keeping setup wasn't adequate to handle the land near I-5, so the rest of this page concerns those areas.  I went to these next two on the 16th.

East of I-5, area 5 (J on first map)

This area sandwiched between I-5, an entrance, and an exit, north of 45th St, is pretty seriously inaccessible, even though, as best I can tell, it isn't fenced at all.  I doubt it's inhabited.

East of I-5, area 6 (K on map)

As you can see in the above photo, dear Diary, and still more in this next one, this area, the accessible one north of 45th, is quite steep:

This area is thickly inhabited, so I didn't explore it much.  I think it's possible that the fence survives entirely.  That fence appears never to have enclosed the area shown in blue on the first map, but there are tents on both sides of the fence.  A door-sized gap in the fence along 45th St, where there may have been a door-sized gate, now stands empty; this is presumably how people in the western, fenced-in, tents get out.  Unlike University Heights Plaza, this encampment still has "sanican"s, and an SPU sink that I found running on the 16th, although I screwed up photographing that.

I think most of this area is steep enough that there probably isn't anything more worthwhile to be done with it than what's happening now.  I realise that for the haters of the homeless so common in city government that isn't enough reason to leave things as they are, but I hope whoever makes the decisions about this space continues to make sweeping it a low priority, maybe even contingent on treating the people living there as if they were actually people.

East of I-5, area 7 (L on map)

This area north of 50th St is another steep area, but differs from area 6 in that the hilltop is long, wide and relatively smooth, sort of flattish.  There are several places to climb to it; the further north one goes, the easier the climbs are.  Most of the tents are on or near the hilltop.

There are at least two fences.  One, a typical chain link fence, starts from the bridge and runs some distance along 50th, then turns north.  The other fence, which comes from the north, is made not of metal but of some stone, perhaps concrete.  The hilltop is between the two fences as they now exist.  I find it hard to believe homeless people have done anything to the stone fence, because its present endpoint looks orderly; I don't fully know what the state of the metal fence is, but certainly the two fences don't meet now, if they ever did.  The map above shows my best guess as to what areas WSDOT intended to fence.

Photographing this area was my main loose end for the 18th.  I'd been put off the first time by the density of tents and the difficulty of the climb I chose that time.  So first I photographed the hill side itself:

And then took two views of the other hill side, from the bridge, the first close-up, the second not:

Finally, dear Diary, maybe you've noticed the smaller "M" on the first map.  I went back out today to look specifically at that space between 7th Ave, an entrance and an exit, into which 47th St ends.  It isn't very big at all, but even so, there's a single line of fence running its length, probably to discourage people from trying to walk or drive across it and into traffic.

Well, dear Diary, that's it for now, and since I haven't even started the map for Brooklyn, probably it for today.  Happy hours until we meet again.

Introduction to my hikes of the U-District and Ravenna

Dear Diary,

Whoopee!  I'm almost ready to tell you about my hikes of one week ago.  Within a few days I hope to be completely ready; as things stand, I'm ready for the first three parts, anyway.

I liked the scale of the maps I made for downtown so much that I decided to standardise on that scale.  It's proving useful for North Seattle as well, but inconveniently, I don't yet know enough to make maps on that scale as large enough as I want them.

So these hikes are going to be narrated with more than one map per page.  Here's an overview:

"Three Hikes in Ravenna" will be illustrated by maps A, B and D.  I intend to begin writing the three parts of this page I plan tonight.

"Three Hikes in University Heights" will be illustrated by maps A and C.  I intend to begin writing the one part of this page I plan tomorrow.

"Four [or more] Hikes in Brooklyn" will be illustrated by map E.  I hope to begin writing it on Tuesday, October 18.

And whenever I can, which will probably be months from now, "Many Hikes on Campus" will be illustrated by maps E, F and G.

Spoiler:  There's very little news.  The water fountain in "lower" Ravenna Park has completely stopped working, possibly because of vandalism; however, its water is running non-stop, so it's as wasteful as it can reasonably be.  Otherwise, the park water fountains in this area - "upper" Ravenna Park, Cowen Park, University Playground and Christie Park - all work fine.  The shell of the street fountain that used to be in front of the University Temple is still behind the fence of that vacant lot.  The restrooms in "upper" Ravenna Park and the women's room in "lower" Ravenna Park are all open; the men's room in "lower" Ravenna Park and both restrooms at each of Cowen Park and University Playground are not open.  (Come winter, the only open park restroom in this area will be the women's room in "lower" Ravenna, if that.)  Oh, and most of North Passage Point is fenced off because concrete chips are falling from the bottom of the I-5 bridge.

There is, however, one very little bit of big news, which I hope to tell you about in detail before months from now, dear Diary.  The University of Washington's Seattle campus, to quote someone to whom I described you yesterday, "is becoming a locked campus".  So for the time being, while I can't photograph any of the popular parks on campus because they're thronged all day long, I'm visiting the buildings instead, and observing their hours.  Just in the few days I've been doing this, I've seen several hours changes, but in broad outline, the quote is true.  Concretely, I spent my days at the UW mostly in five buildings, at least fourteen hours inside per day.  If I become homeless again in the near future, one of those buildings will be closed to me, and the other four's hours have been cut very much.  I've already found a few examples of other buildings becoming more accessible, but none in ways that would actually make a difference.  So I'd certainly have to spend holidays outside, and weekends during breaks outside, and probably could spend no more than twelve hours per day inside during regular quarters, and no more than eight in summer quarter and breaks.

Between this, the park restrooms' closures, and the closure of the Urban Rest Stop's U-District branch, it's become immensely harder to be homeless in the U-District lately.  No doubt if I were to ask anyone who made the relevant decisions about this, they'd say it was all a coincidence.  They'd mention COVID-19, the difficulty of hiring anyone (people are so hard to find right now that I've managed to stay unemployed for seven months!), and budget tightness.  But, well, to whatever extent I'm a journalist at all, I'm not the kind of journalist who asks people like that questions like that.  I'm just going to document what I can of the facts I observe, and leave your readers to decide what they mean.

This problem is much bigger than the libraries, but I hope anyway to tell you, dear Diary, about the public university libraries - meaning the major state schools, mainly UW but also Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington State University in Vancouver, Evergreen State College (which now offers some masters' degrees, so I'm counting it as a university), and also the campuses without libraries of Central Washington University and Western Washington University in Everett and Eastern Washington University in Sammamish.  Tuesday, October 18.

As a reminder, here's the key I'm using:

To unpack:

Open land (without concern for how easy it is to walk through) is green if it's represented by the City of Seattle's Department of Parks and Recreation.  It's blue if it's owned by any other governmental unit.  And it's black if it's privately owned.

Open land is also olive green if it's owned by the Seattle parks department, if it's closed to the public in some way (usually a fence, for open land).  Similarly, it's whatever that different bluish colour is called if it's owned by some other governmental unit, and dark gray if it's privately owned.

Buildings are the same colours but only in outline.  (Usually, closed buildings are just locked.)

Restrooms are shown as small rectangular outlines.  There are four cases:  Are they on open land, or somewhere else?  And are they open to the public (at least some of the time) or are they closed?  In practise, I needn't have worried quite so much.  Essentially all buildings open to the public have working restrooms, though not all such buildings have public working restrooms.  A restroom that isn't working or isn't public is red.  (The careful reader will notice that this is a change from the key.  Sorry, but I'd rather spend time writing up the results of the hikes than updating that key.)  A public restroom that is working is the colour of the owner, or if it's on open or closed land (which is usually the case), it's white.

Water fountains are shown as small round outlines.  They have the same colour pattern as restrooms.

All for now, dear Diary.  Let me try to get at least part of "Three Hikes in Ravenna" written up tonight.  But if not, have a good night, and I should manage to write the first part by tomorrow morning.

Bitter Lake Playfield and Licton Springs Park Today - and Tonight

Dear Diary,

Today I had to go to Home Depot to deal with some problems left (I hope) by a departing housemate (the topic of the public good has been on my mind a whole lot lately), and decided to extend the trip to include Bitter Lake Playfield, which isn't especially close to Home Depot, but also isn't especially close to anywhere else I go either, so why not?  While there I tried to talk myself into going to all three of the Greenwood parks with plumbing, but finally settled for going only to the one some of whose plumbing was closed earlier this year.  So that's why those two parks today.

I took the scenic route to Aurora, meaning I went through Woodland Park.  Still no sweep, still no sweep announcements.  I don't get it, but maybe some official drove up to a sign I saw there:

and actually paid attention.  (Maybe the photo isn't as clear as I intended:  someone has added to the base sign "IN THE NAME OF LOVE".)  Or maybe they're waiting for the rain to return, to make the sweep even more cruel.  I don't know.

Anyway, the other two parks present very different (though, underneath, related) pictures, so I should probably separate them, but before I do:  Most of the photos of Bitter Lake, and one of the photos of Licton Springs, are at the Google Drive folders (Bitter Lake, Licton Springs), so are securely dated.

Bitter Lake Playfield

Last time I was at this park, I found a running water fountain near the playground that I hadn't previously noticed.  This was during the second year's part of what I've called the Durkan Drought; near as I can figure, that fountain was replacing fountains at Northacres Park that had been running during the first year's part, but not the second.

I also found what looked like metal thieves' work on one of the two bowls of the water fountain I'd already known about, and concluded that neither bowl was likely to run soon, because I assumed their plumbing must be so linked that one running while the other lacked a spout and piping would produce flooding.

Well, turns out the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation has standardised on a smarter design of water fountain than that.  Look, dear Diary:

This is a good thing, too, because both the non-running bowl of this fountain, and the fountain near the playground, have clogged drains, so their bowls are full.  (The lower of the above shots got my newspaper section wet.)  Here's the playground fountain:

I also found the restrooms open.  Now, they'd been open in spring, so this wasn't a great surprise, but there are some issues about those restrooms.  First, last autumn they weren't open because of construction delays, and I found one of the "sanican" substitutes burnt (or maybe that was winter?), just as I found such a "sanican" substitute burnt at University Playground yesterday.  Second, ever since last summer I've suspected these restrooms of being open 24 hours, on two grounds:  people there at the time said they were, and they were open far too late on that visit to be locked by parks department personnel.  (But locking them could still be left for hired security guys, as at Green Lake Park last winter.)

So I went back to Bitter Lake Playfield tonight.  I wasn't there noticeably later than on my first visit over a year ago, so this still isn't conclusive, but I found them open later than 9 P.M. again.

And yes, I realise those photos don't prove anything here, but they're both at the Google Drive folder, where their times survive uploading.

Anyway, that brings me to the third issue about Bitter Lake Playfield's restrooms.  They'll probably be under construction again next year.  It looks like designs are being finalised for a complete rebuild of the playground and restroom building (that's what the large sign on the women's room gate is about).  The existing building was closed last winter, though for "historic low usage" rather than unreadiness for Seattle's winters, so will probably be closed this winter, and then under construction until that's done.  Which means the next time I can afford to visit the park at 2 A.M. or some other such decisive time is probably going to be too late.

The reason the "sanican" was burnt last autumn or winter, I assume, has to do with the reason "historic low usage" was such a stupid criterion then:  There's been a huge and famous homeless camp at that Playfield throughout the pandemic.  Except that when the parks department began to flex some muscle to get them to move, many moved to the school property next door; and when sweeps of other parks really got going, still more did.  A sweep of Bitter Lake has been long postponed because our wonderful mayor declared that encampments on school property were the exclusive business of the Seattle Public Schools, which neither have staff to deal with this kind of thing at all, nor want to be demonised for sweeps.  Another issue, though, was that the border between the Playfield and the School seems not to have been clear.  That, at least, someone has decided is settled:

And today, for the first time in my experience, all the tents were on the School side of that fence.

But they had left some parting gifts behind on the Playfield side:

This is clearly homeless-encampment trash - it includes several mattress-like items - and it struck me as, on top of the burnt "sanican", more than a little mean-spirited.  The people who will have to clean it up are not the people who make decisions the campers object to, and the decision-makers are unlikely even to notice the .1% increase in parks trash costs that results.

Anyway, Bitter Lake for today represents a very different scenario from Licton Springs, though both sets of restrooms would normally close in November (and for the same reason).

Licton Springs Park

Most of the photos I took of Licton Springs aren't at the Google Drive folder, and that doesn't matter, because my news here is old and, apparently, to everyone but me, unimportant.

The Seattle Fire Department announced on September 4th, on Twitter, a fire under control at Licton Springs Park, in a "cinder block type structure".  Near as I can tell, nobody else, not even some neighbourhood blog, has reported on this fire.

The Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation already knows how to deal with this kind of thing, from years of practice at Magnuson Park:

Unfortunately, here the water fountains, which ran during both phases of the Durkan Drought, are attached to the restroom building, so are inside the fence.

One commenter on Twitter wondered if the fire was started by a "vagrant's campfire".  This would not be an unreasonable thing to wonder, in the abstract, but having seen the results even two months later, I doubt it.  This fire burned hot, and it created a whole lot of ash, which has drifted all over the place.  I think at some level this fire was arson, whether in complaint against the closure of the restrooms, or as a way of preventing future homeless camps there like the slobs whose obnoxiously messy occupation in 2020 (largely on top of federally protected wetlands) was what led the parks department to close the restrooms this spring in the first place.  Arson is traditionally for profit, and I don't see that here, but this fire has in common with arson that - at least in my uninformed opinion - it was planned.

More photos trying, and probably failing, to back these claims up:

At any rate, now I see that University Playground's restrooms still have at least one step to go before demolition:  a fence.

I would not be optimistic about any specific fenced-in restroom, however.  The tower building at Magnuson Park has, after all, been fenced in for five years, and is considerably more urgent, from any sensible parks perspective, to fix, than either Licton Springs's or University's restrooms.  The boarded-up doors at Woodland Park's "Rio" (Citywide Athletic Building) men's room and one of the single-user stalls at Matthews Park probably represent smaller versions of the same 'We might get to it someday, if funds allow' situation.

Some meta notes

I've been finding that photo-heavy Blogspot pages - specifically, yours, dear Diary, and Cliff Mass's weather blog's - are essentially impossible for me to load with all their photos at the same time, at the moment.  This appears not to represent my house's Wi-Fi choking (I get similar results on my phone without Wi-Fi), so I suspect Blogspot itself is unable, at present, to deal properly with blogs like this one.  My apologies to anyone else affected by this.  I still prefer to show you the photos, dear Diary, because I don't have much storage on the phone with which I take them - which has now taken to reminding me, with most shots, that it's taking time to store them - and because I assume sooner or later Blogspot will take care of the problem.

Anyway, I spent so much time today in North Seattle that I can't even finish the other page(s) meant to back up my claims about throwing amenities away, let alone the pages actually explaining those claims, before the election.  At some level, this is right:  your remit, after all, dear Diary, is North Seattle parks, and that other page isn't even about North Seattle.  But I can't actually keep spending entire weekends on you anyway, and you should learn the value of solidarity, so I hope you'll bear with me that this is the second-last "today" post for some time to come.  Until the last, good night and good days, dear Diary.

Anyone who wants references to the events discussed above in the parks mentioned, and is reading on a phone, should please ask his or her browser to behave like a desktop one, and then re-load this page.  Desktop readers get access to "labels", what everyone else in the world calls tags, which enable pulling up other pages with related topics.  I don't have time tonight to do all the links I did with last night's post (for which I'd hoped for far more readers than it looks like it'll get).

On the off chance that anyone reads this page who cares how I plan to vote:  for the big four races that have led The Seattle Times to wax apocalyptic, and have led to so much advertising advocacy, a straight left ticket - I want to see whether the progressive project can succeed under even optimum conditions, before changing my basic allegiance, and also at least two of the progressives' opponents have openly broken laws recently - even though all the opponents, but none of the progressives, have sent me mail; but the remaining races, I now have very little time to decide about.  

Anyway, dear Diary, don't expect such late posts in future:  the troublesome housemate who left was my next door and only real neighbour in this house, but his room won't stay empty forever, and one major reason I'm typing so late is that I also had to do laundry almost so late (it finished before this page!), after that second visit today to Bitter Lake, and might as well violate quiet time some more, circumstances I'll try not to let happen again.  So again, good night.